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088-3_TEXT_PRF5_TO-PRESS.indd 15 2/26/20 10:48 AM 088-3_TEXT_PRF5_TO-PRESS.indd 16 2/26/20 10:48 AM For here too there are gods. — Heraclitus

1 The wild river flows down from the northern reaches of the Appalachian Highlands where for almost half the year it is encased in ice and buried in deep layers of snow. In early spring, as the days grow longer and the heat of the sun grows stronger, the ice begins to crack and shift until it shatters into a rugged slurry that rumbles downriver, scraping shorelines, plowing down trees, rearranging boulders, scouring gravel beds, dividing islands and forming new ones. Every year the ice run leaves behind scars on rocks and trees, witness marks in a story of change that passes through a vast measure of time. The freshet follows the ice run, the snowmelt from the hills running into a torrent that breaches the banks and spills into the floodplains, back channels, gullies and swamps. As the flow subsides, the water clears, and the river recedes into its banks. Summer blooms in a rush of greens, sweeping across the floodplains and hills, as if in a hurry to make the most of the season. When cool nights sprinkle frost in the valley, mists swirl over the water, and hardwoods on the hillsides turn orange and crimson until winter winds strip the trees bare and the ice and snow return again. The wild river is creation in motion, yet each season when we return to the valley, we recognize landmarks from stories centuries old, the names passed on from one generation of travellers to the next: Campbell’s, Jimmy’s Hole, Cheyne, Trotting Grounds, Stillwater, Devil’s Half Acre, Three Sisters, Shingle, White Brook Island, Pine Island, Cross Point, Two Brooks, Chamberlain Shoals, Chain of Rocks, Rafting Grounds.

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We know these places as we know the timbre of the river’s voice, the texture of its waters, the shape of its meanders, the colour and polish of its stones. No two rivers are the same; in all the world, there is only one Restigouche. That’s why long ago the river gods were many and the sea god was one. The runs northeast for 200 kilometres, marking the border between the Canadian provinces of and , before spilling into . The narrow bay, 130 kilometres long, bends northeast toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic . The headwaters of the Restigouche rise in streams that spill into the Little Main Restigouche from the southwest and the from the northwest. The main river begins where the currents of the Kedgwick and Little Main collide in a deep, swirling pool we call the Junction. Below the Junction, the river continues to collect water from countless small streams and three major tributaries: the Patapédia from the north, the Upsalquitch from the southwest and the Matapédia from the northeast. The Matapédia, which runs through the province of Quebec, is the only tributary that passes through towns and villages. The others flow through wild spaces broken by a scattering of logging roads and isolated fishing lodges, some of them more than a century old, built by a handful of the wealthiest people of their time who came to the river when ’s connected this valley to the outside world in the summer of 1876. There are small cities in New Brunswick on the south side of the Restigouche estuary, Campbellton and Dalhousie with its deep-water harbour, and the remote hills of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula across the river to the north. Listuguj is on the northern shore opposite Campbellton, Ugpi'Ganjig on the southern shore just beyond Dalhousie, both communities of Mi'gmaq, the First People of this river. Their territory is called Mi'gma'gi, and it includes the Gaspé Peninsula, the islands in Chaleur Bay, the Atlantic provinces of Canada and part of the state of Maine. The Restigouche flows through Gespe'gewa'gi, the last land, the seventh and largest district of Mi'gma'gi, extending from the Miramichi

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River in the south to the farthest reaches of the Gaspé Peninsula in the north. Each of the Restigouche tributaries has its own personality, yet they all share the primary characteristic of the main river, which is the startling clarity of the water. Over the years, I have floated hundreds of kilometres by canoe on these waters. On clear days I can see every stone on the river bottom from bank to bank. And when I look down into the deep ledge-framed pools and hollowed-out pockets below cold-water brooks, I see silver Atlantic salmon that have returned to spawn on the same gravel beds where they spent the first seasons of their lives before migrating thousands of kilometres to distant oceans and back again. For generations, the Restigouche salmon has defined, united and divided this valley and the people of the river. A well-travelled American journalist who came here in the 1860s wrote of a great river flowing through one of the most “superb and fascinating” landscapes on the continent, where mists swirl along cliffs and chasms and across “far-reaching sweeps of outline and continually rising domes,” the water “gleaming like polished steel.” He published a long feature in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in March 1868 that opens by stating matter of factly that the Restigouche valley affords “unquestionably the best field for the sportsman to be found in America, east of the Rocky Mountains.” The writer suggested that if artists followed him and captured what they saw on canvas, they would paint another Heart of the Andes or Valley of the Yosemite and call it Restigouche.

2 The course of my life turned toward the river when my family moved north from Montgomery County, Maryland, to the seaport city of Saint John, New Brunswick, where my father had taken a job as the pastor at a downtown Presbyterian church. It was the spring of 1969, three months after my sixth birthday. In Maryland we lived in a two-storey brick manse across the road from a country church with a white clapboard

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steeple, surrounded by farms, flat dirt roads and wire fences. In Saint John we moved into a duplex in a working-class Irish Roman Catholic neighbourhood on the west side of a deep-water harbour where weathered saltbox row houses lined the streets that ran up the hills that frame the mouth of the Saint John River. There the water rushes into the through a deep gut carved by the current known as the Reversing Falls, named for the dangerous rapids that turn and run upstream on the incoming tide. We came to this rough-hewn town at a time when mothers and fathers pushed their sons and daughters outside in all seasons and told them to return only for meals or treatment of serious injury. When I stepped out my front door, I fell into the embrace of gangs of boys and girls who mapped their playgrounds through a maze of grassy clifftop paths, rugged beaches and railway yards, through the remains of crumbling cattle sheds, longshoremen’s shelters and the long cargo sheds along waterfront docks. In the days of my youth, we were all explorers, and the freedom I discovered in my new Canadian home suited me just fine. This was the time of my second birth, when I awoke to feel the salted winds on my face and the rocky earth beneath my feet. My father grew up in Tampa, Florida, exploring the sandy Gulf coastline and Everglade swamps with fishing rods and rifles. Later, when we lived in Maryland, he fished and hunted along the wild streams of the West Virginia hills. We arrived in Saint John at a time when the calamity of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of a president, a civil rights leader, and the president’s brother had caused my father to lose his passion for shooting. He stored his hunting rifles and shotgun when he came to Canada, but it was not long before he started looking for places to fish. When I was old enough to hike through the forest and wade in flowing water, my father started taking me with him as he explored the rivers and streams near our home. My father is slight but sturdy, straight-backed and deceptively strong. In the southern tradition, I was named after him, as he was named after his father. Like many men of his generation, he has perfect manners and

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tidy presentation. He fearlessly took up winter sports when we moved north, teaching himself to ski and skate, although he never learned to do either particularly well. One Sunday morning he processed into the sanctuary sporting a weeping black eye that he earned by falling on his face playing hockey on a frozen pond the day before. He always preached the revolutionary message of the New Testament, that we must love our enemies and the meek shall inherit the Earth. I learned to write by listening to the cadence of the sermons that he scribbled on unlined paper and read aloud before leaving for church. One summer we launched a canoe into a stream called New River to search for a stretch of water called the Diamond Pools. A man at a rural general store had told my father that the pools were filled with brook trout. We didn’t know precisely where they were, only that they lay somewhere above the highway bridge. So that’s where we set out, in a canoe filled with camping gear and fishing rods, pushing against the current in a stream so shallow and rocky that we were soon wading and dragging instead of paddling. Our trips were often this kind of Presbyterian enterprise, based on the assumption that good fishing waters would be reached after a long slog that only those of sturdy faith would have the fortitude to endure. For two days we dragged the canoe upstream, portaging around a small waterfall, camping at night on grassy bluffs above the stone beaches beside the river. We never found the Diamond Pools on the New River, but I’ve always carried with me memories of that trip, the anticipation of turning another bend with nothing but unexplored territory ahead. Most importantly, I was learning to seek grace through perseverance, that the inevitable difficulties and hardships we encounter on trips such as these, and in the passages of our lives, are necessary obstacles to overcome. Sometimes we have no choice but to pull our canoe over a shallow gravel bar or shoulder it across a portage. In my life, I’ve done my share of both. As the years passed, my father and I ranged farther north to the remote border region of New Brunswick and Quebec, into the valley of the Restigouche, and after our first season on the river, we returned to it

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at every opportunity. For more than two decades, first with my father and later with my friends and other members of my family, I’ve been following the clear currents of the Restigouche along high-cut banks, dropping over the tumble of rapids into deep pools. At the end of long summer days, we’ve swung our canoes out of the flow, pulled them into the high grasses on the shore and camped in splendid isolation on wild islands. We’ve watched eagles and osprey dive for fish in the shallows and moose ford the river with spring calves. We’ve climbed mountain trails that follow the river’s feeder brooks cascading down from cold springs over moss- covered rocks, cooked over open fires on polished gravel beaches, slept in rustic cabins, and cast flies for salmon on cool mornings and at dusk in driving rainstorms. We’ve made our beds beside the water, watched the last light reflect off the tops of towering balsam firs heavy with moss, and then stood in a warm circle of first light by the river to drink a cup of coffee brewed over a morning fire.

3 For me, the Restigouche has always been an expression of nature’s fragile grace flowing through a world that affords little value to wild rivers and the lands that sustain them. In each new season I watched assaults on natural systems spread through the valley. Some I have seen with my own eyes: the logging trucks rumbling down from the hills twenty-four hours a day; the cuts growing larger and creeping ever closer to the river; feeder brooks that once flowed through the summer now dry and choked with sediment washed down from nearby logging and more distant industrial enterprises. The hills have been sprayed from the air with pesticides and herbicides, and the old mixed forests transformed into new monoculture tree plantations. Through it all, the salmon still return to spawn in the river, although they are now engaged in a grim survival game, both in their home waters and in warming and rising seas. We recognize that the river and all the life systems that it supports are not what they once were, even in my lifetime. But how did this

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